He’s not the engine but the hood ornament for a movement that now feels liberated from traditional rules of decent behavior.

During the campaign, conservatives said they were embracing Donald Trump despite his character. They were willing to overlook his flaws in order to achieve policy victories. Yes, he was a vulgar boor, a charlatan, a comic buffoon wandering the landscape, stepping on political land mines. But at least he would appoint the right people. Even if he didn’t, he would never be Hillary Clinton.

(Bold emphasis mine)

Note, the author Ben Sharpio is referencing Social Conservative values who equally views Top-Down determination of said values centered on social conservative values be determined by Government. These arguments date back to this article

But for a minority of conservatives, Trump’s character was always a feature, not a bug. He fought, and even if he didn’t fight smart, he was willing to hit anyone with a glass vase at any time. He was an unpredictable force, a brutal hurricane tearing apart the old political institutions. For this group, Trump’s character recommended him rather than counted against him.

Under President Trump, one inconvenient and morally disquieting fact has become increasingly clear: More and more conservatives fall into the second group.

Note, the transition from lauding Social Conservative values to lack of accomplishments.

We’re happy with it even though we’re not getting the big wins we were promised. There have been precisely two big Trump wins for conservatives: Justice Neil Gorsuch, and regulatory reform via the Congressional Review Act and the Environmental Protection Agency.

If Mike Pence replaced Donald Trump and implemented every jot and tittle of the conservative program, then won reelection, most Republicans would be enraged, not excited.

(Bold emphasis mine)

Note, the shift that could impeachment or utilization of the 25th Amendment that requires VP Pence and staff-cabinet Pence was tasked to selecting with Trump’s approval to pull the trigger on the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from the Presidency.

Instead, many Republicans seem overjoyed to embrace the Trump Jr. –Russia meeting. They’ve moved beyond claiming that the media lack evidence for actual collusion (which they do); they now say that even if Trump colluded with Russia, it’s fine.

Trump allows us to indulge our id and feel righteous while doing it. We grew up believing that decent behavior made you a decent person — but then we realized that breaking the rules not only makes victory easier, it’s more fun than having to struggle with the moral qualms of using moral means to achieve moral ends. So we’ve constructed a backwards logic to absolve ourselves of moral responsibility.

[The first premise: The other side, which wants bad things, cheats and lies and acts in egregious ways.]

The second premise: It requires cheating to defeat them.

The third premise: If they are not defeated, the country will be destroyed.

Conclusion: It is morally required to cheat and lie and act in egregious ways.

Donald Trump’s behavior as commander in chief has unnerved respondents to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, 70 percent of whom said he has acted in an unpresidential manner since assuming office.

The president fared even worse when respondents were asked about his personal behavior. Seventy percent said Trump has been unpresidential, 68 percent said they do not see him as a positive role model, and 56 percent said his conduct is “damaging to the presidency overall.”

White House officials are blaming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for getting stuffed at the goal line on ObamaCare repeal-and-replace legislation, while GOP senators say Trump failed to provide any meaningful political momentum for the prized measure.

“He’s the president of the United States. These people are folks who are looking to him to help them,” said a second Republican senator who requested anonymity to discuss Trump’s stance frankly.

Trump exasperated McConnell last month when he tweeted that Republican senators should immediately repeal ObamaCare and work on replacement legislation at a later date if they could not get their bill, the Better Care Reconciliation Act, over the finish line.

Republican sources close to McConnell complained that it gave conservatives such as Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) “a place to go” if they opposed the Senate bill.

While Vice President Pence and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price met with governors over the weekend to build support for the Senate healthcare bill, GOP senators complained the president did little to build public support for the legislation.

Despite the promise of economic expansion from a succession of presidents from both parties, they have struggled with stagnant wages and dwindling job opportunities.

Those angry blue-collar voters across longtime Democratic strongholds such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin are now firmly behind Mr. Trump and his Republican Party, said G. Terry Madonna, director of the polling program at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Despite a series of polls showing historically low job approval ratings after six months in office, as low as 36 percent in a Washington Post/ABC News survey, Mr. Trump remains popular with his base.

“Do we represent prosperity, economic growth, higher take home pay, more jobs or not?” the former House speaker and GOP presidential hopeful asked Fox News host Sean Hannity during an interview aired Monday evening.

“I personally believe that they ought to do as much as they can on health care right now, but they shouldn’t spend the whole rest of this year on one issue,” Mr. Gingrich said of the Republican Party. “They’ve also got to pass, I think, by Thanksgiving, and get signed into law by Thanksgiving, a very large tax cut retroactively designed back to Jan. 1, to make sure we have enough economic growth in 2018 that Republicans can run as the party of prosperity, of jobs, of higher take-home pay, and of economic growth.”

Plenty of Republican lawmakers have publicly condemned Russia for interfering with the 2016 election—and a few have even explicitly raised concerns about the Trump campaign’s alleged involvement in that effort. But Democrats and NeverTrump conservatives say lip service isn’t enough. In their view, the possibility that Trump won the presidency in part because his campaign worked with a foreign adversary to sway the election is so scandalous—and such a threat to the democratic process—that it demands urgent, bipartisan action.

If Republicans wanted to take this seriously, Trump’s opponents argue, there are plenty of concrete steps available to them. They could start issuing subpoenas more aggressively; stall legislation and block nominees until they get answers from the administration; support the resolutions of inquiry in the House; and hold regular press conferences updating the public on the status of their investigations.

Officials told the Post that shutting down the program, begun by the Obama administration in 2013, is a sign of Trump’s attempts to work with Russia, which has viewed the U.S. attempts to force out Syrian President Bashar Assad during that country’s civil war as an attack on its own interests.

One current official told the Post that the decision is a massive concession to Moscow, saying that “Putin won in Syria.”

… Put aside the factual inaccuracies in this missive (it was not Hillary Clinton’s controversial private server the Russians are alleged to have hacked, despite Donald Trump’s explicit pleading with them to do so, but rather those of the Democratic National Committee and her campaign chairman, John Podesta). Here, laid bare, are the impulses of a large swathe of today’s Republican Party

What I never expected was that the Republican Party—which once stood for a muscular, moralistic approach to the world, and which helped bring down the Soviet Union—would become a willing accomplice of what the previous Republican presidential nominee rightly called our No. 1 geopolitical foe: Vladimir Putin’s Russia. My message for today’s GOP is to paraphrase Barack Obama when he mocked Romney for saying precisely that: 2012 called—it wants its foreign policy back.

Their ranting about “neocon warmongers” shows that these women have problems. But let’s not pretend that they are alone in their hatred of Senator McCain. For years, McCain has been more than a target for anti-interventionists and immigration restrictionists. He is a hate figure for the Left and the once-fringe Right.

Some members of Congress are asking why Obama-administration officials such as Brennan, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice requested surveillance files on Trump-campaign officials, may have unmasked names, and may have allowed those names to be illegally leaked to the press.

Earlier, some Republican anti-Trump operators (and later some Clinton campaign operatives) hired former British spy and opposition researcher Christopher Steele to compile a dossier on Donald Trump that would include some ludicrous Russia-related allegations. Weirder still, Steele’s firm may have had some contacts with none other than Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

On four prior occasions in American history the country nearly split apart, as seemingly irreconcilable cultural, economic, political, social, geographical, and demographic fault lines opened a path to hatred and violence.

Now, lets recap the 2016 election cycle:
The populist movement Trump tapped is anti-globalization, anti-guilty until proven innocent, and anti-expansionist foreign policy coupled with disenfranchised Sanders’ supporters who crossed the aisle to protest Hillary Clinton; in addition to, voters who are disenfranchised with both Democrats’ leadership and Republicans’ leadership.

Is US foreign policy about spreading ‘democracy’ or enforcing the US Dollar’s world’s reserve currency status? The answer seems to be enforcing the US Dollar’s world’s reserve currency status whose decoupling began in 2009 by economic-military pacts between Russia and China that laid the foundation of China’s AIIB banking system. Who are Russia’s and China’s buffer zones? Ukraine, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea.

Why would enforcing the US Dollar’s world’s reserve currency status be important? Old school measurements taking this status into account is over 80% of GDP is a bubble with this status and without over 93% of GDP. Historically, the options have been narrowed to either downsizing Federal agencies, Severe Austerity, or War and Rationing.

It means in order to enforce and preserve the US Dollar’s world’s reserve currency status; the US foreign policy is leveraged by Britain and Eurozone interests and OPEC members of the Arabian Alliance primarily Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and UAE among others.

This also places US national interests in direct polarization of both Russian and Chinese interests.

… Without China pulling the plug on North Korea, the crisis will not abate.

The U.S., then, could soon face two horrible options: start a catastrophic war that would kill hundreds of thousands of South Koreans or live with a nuclear-armed North Korea capable of striking Washington.

It’s a frightening possibility, one that Trump and other top U.S. policymakers must do everything to avoid. But if we really want to block the North’s nuclear program without another Korean War, it requires us to think carefully about what could actually persuade China to cut off its support for the North Korean regime. And that leads us to a previously unthinkable idea: giving real consideration to removing all American troops from a unified peninsula in exchange for China proactively leading the transition to a unified Korea.

The answer is yes. In fact, many national security experts know what the Chinese would demand: China wants the U.S. military off the peninsula. South Korea is a vital defense, security and trade partner of the United States.

Here’s how a deal could work: The U.S. would remove all 30,000 troops from South Korea and close its military bases. We could even consider ending our treaty with South Korea. In return, China would not only cease its support for North Korea but help end the Kim dynasty altogether, leaving behind a unified, democratic Korea that swears off nuclear weapons.

Is eliminating the U.S. military presence on the peninsula a fair price for China finally—and fully—pulling the plug on North Korea? It’s a difficult question with huge security and economic implications, and I’m honestly not sure about the answer. The rapid fall of the Kim regime isn’t even guaranteed under such a deal and there’s a real possibility that a unified Korea would align more closely with China than the U.S., undermining our strength in the region.

(Bold emphasis mine)

South Korea is part of the global economy promoted by globalization, and globalization promotes sustaining the US Dollar’s world’s reserve currency status by military enforcement.

If you study diplomatic history, it’s pretty plain BRICS particularly Russia and China are well aware of these interests, and it reverses the dynamics of the Soviet Union and US.

Note, abroad analysts of the fall of the Soviet Union (USSR) state Cold Wars are won by the nation possessing the world’s reserve currency status, and the Soviets failed to directly challenge the United States citing specifically the Soviet’s backing down in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then, you have the War College war-game scenarios citing the US Military’s unconventional warfare focus as a lose-lose proposition against Russia, against China, and against a Russo-Sino pact.

Why is this important? First, it means war expanding 3 or more continents is very likely. Second, it means to successfully fight a war against Russia or China; this requires an pact with one against the other. Third, the present positioning and maneuvering of physical projection assets given present path trends renders dividing the two against each other deeply improbable to the point of wishful thinking at best or delusional thinking at worst.

At least for the time being, the United States is presently not at war with either Britain or Russia, but the US seeking to preserve the US Dollar’s world’s reserve currency status makes it a foregone conclusion while it lacks the capacity to convincingly persuade Russia or China against the other, which doesn’t bode well.

According to diplomatic history, it’s more in Russian and Chinese interests for the US to initiate acts of aggression while it appears many analysts ignore or omit old school measurements under the painful argument ‘this time is different’.

‘Those who fail to learn from history are often doomed to repeat it’.

‘Those who wish to make history often do so by repeating history’.

What we’re seeing is Bush Republicanism, Neocons, and Social Conservatives who makeup Republicans’ leadership frustrated their analysis of ‘culture war’ dependent on statistics as Democrats hates Republicans and Republicans hates Democrats hasn’t concluded in the manner they believed.

If Mike Pence replaced Donald Trump and implemented every jot and tittle of the conservative program, then won reelection, most Republicans would be enraged, not excited.

In a nutshell, their central premise of the ‘culture war’ states the fact Pence was picked as Vice President was irrelevant, and it drives them nuts since they also believed that Democrats like Sanders’ supporters wouldn’t cross the aisle in protest vote for a Democratic nominee. It also means that their entire argument based on expanding Republican’s support base factions through offering ‘Progressive conservative’ alternative like moderate conservative or compassionate conservative that negates attempting to overhaul structural imbalances inherit in globalization, guilty until proven innocent, and expansionist foreign policy also means that they are seen as not offering an actual alternative.

In simple terms, Pence replacing Trump would have focused on interests on the agricultural-consumerist-service economies’ economic model that promotes globalization, guilty until proven innocent, and expansionist foreign policy whose only way of maintaining the US Dollar’s world’s reserve currency status is blurring national defense with national interests like global economy economic centers…

Case and point, if they really wanted to remove Trump, they don’t need Trump-Russia collusion-interference, and they don’t need the 25th Amendment Pence is the catalyst to activate. Responsibility to Protect makes it a war-crime to provide aid not to the established government unless an alternative established government like North-South Korea or Vietnam a war-crime and to do so under false pretenses or utilizing false pretenses for a UN Resolution constitutes a premeditated war-crime. I don’t see it being used as it also requires to maintain any resemblance of equal protection under the law or otherwise equal justice also means HW Bush, W. Bush, McCain, McConnell, Rove, Ryan, B Clinton, Obama, H Clinton, and etc who have also violated RTP must also be prosecuted. I have extreme doubts that would ever happen.